Bosnian Chronicle Read online

  “You’re exaggerating just a little bit, my young friend.”

  “No, life is the one that exaggerates—so much, in fact, that we can never quite keep up with it. I am just trying to clarify single facts, even if the total picture escapes me.”

  “You can’t know and explain everything,” Daville said wearily, in a somewhat offhand voice.

  “No, of course not, but one ought to keep trying.”

  Desfosses, whom the food and wine had warmed up after his ride in the cold air and whose youth now impelled him to think out loud, went on with his recital. “Anyway, how do you explain this?” he said. “The same clever and sensible priest from Dolats, who is certainly in possession of his faculties, gave a sermon from the Dolats pulpit last Sunday. If I’m to believe my groom, who’s a Catholic, the priest claimed in all seriousness that a certain very pious Brother who died the other day in the monastery at Foynitsa was, if not a saint, at least in close touch with the saints, and that it was known beyond doubt that a special angel brought him messages every night from various saints and from Our Lady herself.”

  “You don’t know yet how bigoted these people are.”

  “All right, let’s call it bigotry. But that’s a word that explains nothing.”

  Daville, who considered himself a “wise and moderate liberal,” was apt to chafe at any discussion of faith, however innocent. “It explains everything,” he said rather tartly. “You don’t hear our preachers spreading such tales.”

  “That’s because our conditions of life are not the same, M. Daville. I wonder what we would be preaching if we had led the life of these Christians here for the last three centuries? There wouldn’t be miracles enough in all heaven and earth for our arsenal of faith in the struggle against the Turkish overlord. Believe me, the more I see and listen to these folk the more I realize our mistake, as we subdue one European country after another, of trying to foist on them our concepts and our ways of life and rule, strictly and exclusively rational as they are. I realize more and more that it’s an unsurmountable and witless task, because it’s no earthly use trying to remove abuses and prejudices when you haven’t the power or the inclination to eradicate the causes that are at the bottom of them.”

  “That would take us rather too far afield,” Daville broke in on his Chancellor. “And doubtless there must be someone who’s thinking about it, never you fear.”

  The Consul got up and rang sharply and impatiently for the table to be cleared.

  Whenever the young man, in the sincere and forthright manner that was part of his nature, of which he seemed not to be conscious and which Daville secretly envied him, began to sound as though he were critical of the Imperial regime, Daville would squirm and lose his control and patience. Because he himself was of two minds and harbored secret doubts that he couldn’t admit even to himself, he found it hard to put up with someone else’s disparagement. He felt as if this carefree, unguarded young man bared and put his finger on his rawest spot, which he was doing his utmost not only to hide from the world but, if possible, to forget about himself.

  Nor could Daville talk to Desfosses about literature, and still less about his own writing.

  This was a subject on which Daville was particularly sensitive. For as long as he could remember, he had been planning literary works of various kinds, churning out verses and devising plots. Some ten years before, he had edited, for a while, the literary column of Le Moniteur and had attended the meetings of literary societies. He had to give it all up when he rejoined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was sent to Malta as Chargé d’Affaires, and later to Naples, but he continued writing.

  The verses which he published in various reviews from time to time, and the neatly copied poems which he sent to his friends, superiors, and important personages, were neither much better nor much worse than thousands of other verse products of the day. He called himself a “faithful disciple of the great Boileau,” and in articles that no one ever dreamed of challenging, he vigorously espoused the stern classical rule, pleading for a poetry free from the excesses of imagination, from undue experimentation, and from spiritual confusion. Inspiration was a sine qua non, Daville asserted in his articles, but it must be guided by rational measure and sound content, without which there could be no work of art. Daville put so much emphasis on these principles that readers had the impression he was more concerned with order and discipline in poetry than with poetry itself, almost as if these things were constantly threatened by poets and poetry and must be protected and upheld by any and all means. His model among the poets of the time was Jacques Delille, author of The Gardens and translator of Virgil. Daville printed a series of articles in Le Moniteur in defense of Delille, and again no one paid any attention, either by way of praise or rebuttal.

  For some years now Daville had been occupied with plans for a momentous epic on Alexander the Great. Conceived in twenty-four cantos, the poem had gradually become a kind of disguised diary of Daville’s soul. All his experience of the world, his brooding about Napoleon, war, and politics, his secret wishes and displeasures, were shunted to those far-off times and woven into the hazy circumstances in which his hero had lived, and there he let them roam unchecked save for the modest discipline of metered verse and a more or less mandatory rhyme. Daville was so steeped in the life of his epic that, in addition to the names Jules-François, he gave his second child the name of the Macedonian King Amyntas, Alexander’s grandfather. In this “Alexandriad” of his, Bosnia too came to life as a barren country with a harsh climate and peopled by an odious race, but under the name of Tauris. In it could be found Mehmed Pasha and the Bosnian begs and Catholic friars; and all the others with whom Daville had to work or struggle were depicted and disguised as one or another of Alexander’s retinue or his opponents. All of Daville’s loathing of the East and of the Asiatic spirit in general was here, expressed in terms of his hero’s struggle against distant Asia.

  As he rode above Travnik and gazed down on the roofs and minarets of the town, Daville was often absorbed in mental descriptions of the fabulous Eastern city that Alexander happened to be investing at the time. And when he sat in audience at the Residency and watched the silent, hurrying servants and courtiers, he kept putting the final touches to his description of a senate session in the besieged city of Tyre, in the third canto. Like all writers who lack the gift and the true vocation, Daville was the victim of an obstinate, deep-seated illusion: namely, that a man can arrive at poetry by a certain deliberate exercise of the mind and that creating poetry rewards and consoles man for the evils with which life burdens and surrounds him.

  In his youth Daville had often asked himself whether he was a poet or not. Did his work in this discipline have any significance and promise, or not?

  Now, after all those years of hard work that failed to bring success, even if they had brought no outright failure, it was fairly clear that Daville was no poet. Meanwhile, as often happens, Daville “worked at poetry” more and more doggedly as the years went on, methodically and somewhat mechanically, no longer asking himself that question which youth, in its frank and fearless appraisal of itself, can ask with impunity.

  In his younger days, when he was still acknowledged and encouraged, he wrote less; now, in his years, when no one any longer took him for a poet, he worked steadily and diligently. The spontaneous need for expression and the deceptive energy of youth had given place to a sluggish habit and application. For application, the virtue that so often appears where it is out of place or when it is no longer needed, is the comfort of ungifted writers and the undoing of art. Unusual circumstances, the loneliness and tedium to which he had been condemned for many years, had driven Daville to this futile sidetrack, this artless sin he called poetry. In reality, Daville had gone astray the day he penned his first verse, for his bond with poetry was not a genuine one. He had no feeling for it, even at its most felicitous, and still less could he evoke or create it.

  The spectacle of evil in the world
aroused in Daville either rancor or depression; the spectacle of good, enthusiasm and satisfaction, a kind of moral thrill as it were. And out of those thrills, which plucked at him in a way that was sharp and perfectly real, wayward and fitful though they were, he constructed verses that were everything but poetry; and it was true that the fashion of the time abetted and confirmed him in his mistaken notions.

  And so, pushing harder and harder as the years went by, Daville continued to use his considerable good qualities toward middling ends, and to expect of poetry what it plainly did not have to give: easy moral euphorias and harmless intellectual games and diversions.

  It was understandable that young Desfosses, being what he was, was not a suitable listener or critic, or even a desirable partner in a literary conversation. All of which led to a further widening of the already marked distance between them, to which the Consul was particularly sensitive.

  The young man’s mind revealed itself chiefly by its endless capacity to store facts, by its efficient reasoning and boldness in drawing conclusions. Experience and intuition seemed to work hand in hand in him and complemented each other in a most striking fashion. With all their differences and temperamental incompatibility, Daville couldn’t fail to see that. He often had the impression that this youth of twenty-four had read whole libraries, without, at the same time, attaching any special importance to the fact. Indeed, time and again the young man irritated the Consul with his far-ranging knowledge and the audacity of his judgments. He would talk about Egyptian history or the relation of South American colonies to their motherland like someone playing a game; and then, just as fluently, he would discuss oriental languages, the clashes between races and religions in God knew what part of the world, the aims and prospects of Napoleon’s Continental System, or the problems of communications and tariffs. He would unexpectedly quote from the classics, usually from lesser known texts, and the sentiment would always be crisply appropriate, revealing the subject in a new light. And although quite often the Consul felt that his youthful pose and runaway imagination had got the better of order and actual value, he could not help listening to the young man with a kind of pained and helpless admiration, and also with an enervating sense of his own weakness and inadequacy which he tried in vain to overcome and crush.

  Ah well, the young fellow was deaf and blind to what Daville held dearest and what seemed to him the only thing worth respecting, besides his duties to the state. Desfosses frankly admitted that he did not care for poetry and that the French verse of the day impressed him as foggy, thoroughly insincere, bloodless, and unnecessary. He did not, however, for a moment deny himself the right or the satisfaction to argue and chatter freely and impetuously—without spite, it was true, but also without respect or very much thought—about the very thing which, in his own words, he could neither feel nor had much liking for.

  About Delille, for instance, the adored Delille, he said without hesitation that he was a clever literary-salon type who earned up to six francs per verse, and that, understandably enough, Mme Delille locked him up every day and did not let him out until he had completed his daily quota. This cynicism of the new generation both angered and saddened the Consul. At all events, it only helped to make his isolation profounder.

  It happened sometimes that Daville, driven by his need to talk and communicate, would brush these things aside and start a warm and intimate conversation about his literary views and plans—a forgivable lapse in his circumstances. And so one evening he drew a complete outline of his epic on Alexander the Great and explained the moral framework of his epic work. Without pausing for a moment to consider the validity of these thoughts and conceptions which made up the brighter half of the Consul’s life, the young man, all brisk and smiling, suddenly began to quote from Boileau:

  “Que crois-tu qu’Alexandre, en ravageant la terre,

  Cherche parmi l’horreur, le tumulte et la guerre?

  Possédé d’un ennui qu’il ne saurait dompter

  Il craint d’être à lui-meme et songe à s’éviter.”

  (What do you imagine Alexander, as he lays waste the earth,

  Is seeking amid horror, tumult and war?

  Possessed by a tedium he cannot master

  He fears to be left to his resources and longs to escape from himself.)

  And he added quickly by way of apology that he had once read the lines in one of the Satires and happened to remember them.

  All at once Daville felt offended and immeasurably lonelier than he had been a few minutes before. It was as though he were confronted with the embodied image of the “new generation” and could feel it with his fingers. So this was the wave of the future, this generation of diabolical restlessness and destructive ideas, quick and vapid in its mental associations! A generation that professed “no interest in poetry” but had no qualms about resorting to it—and with a vengeance—whenever it might serve their warped ambitions, to bring the world down flat on its face, to belittle and humble it, their one wish being to reduce everything to what is lowest and worst in man.

  Swallowing his indignation (which was considerable), Daville at once broke off conversation and withdrew to his apartment. He could not sleep for a long time, and even in his dreams he felt the bitterness which an innocent remark can leave behind. For some days afterward he couldn’t bring himself to touch or open the manuscript that lay in its cardboard folder, tied with a green ribbon, so profaned and disparaged did his beloved work appear to him.

  And on his part Desfosses was not in the least aware that he had offended the Consul. On the contrary, since quoting verses by ear was not a strong point of his otherwise remarkable memory, he was pleased that he had remembered them so well and gave no thought to the possibility that they might reflect in some way on Daville’s work and perhaps even displease him, and so affect their relationship. Always, it seems, two consecutive and overlapping generations find it hardest to tolerate each other, and in fact know each other least. Yet so many of their differences and so much of their wrangling rests, as always, on misunderstanding.

  What particularly poisoned the Consul’s sleepless nights and gnawed away at his dreams was the idea that the young man who had so upset him that evening, of whom he thought with bitter displeasure, was now sleeping fast and sound, a sleep as natural and callous as everything he did and said by day. However, the Consul might have spared himself this one indignity at least, for he was wrong. Those who laugh by day and move lightly among men do not necessarily sleep in blissful peace. Young Desfosses was not entirely the carefree, self-contained example of the “new type,” as Daville often supposed—matured too soon and loaded with knowledge, a contented child of a contented Empire, and little else. That night, each of the two Frenchmen nursed his own private malaise, each in his own way, with no possibility of completely understanding the other. Desfosses too was paying, in his own coin, the price of living in new surroundings and unfamiliar circumstances. His means of resistance might be more effective and numerous than Daville’s, yet he too was bogged in the languor of “Bosnian silence” and felt as if the country, and his own vegetation in it, were straining to bend and break him, to sap, whittle, and flatten him down to the level of all things around him. It was no easy or simple matter to be hurled, at the age of twenty-four, from Paris to Moslem Travnik, to be full of plans and ambitions that reached far beyond and above one’s immediate surroundings, and to be forced to wait patiently while all the leashed powers and unappeased hungers of youth chafed and rebelled at waiting.

  The process had begun already at Split. It was like the contraction of an invisible iron hoop. Everything required an extra effort, and the effort itself took more and more doing. Each new step was a little more arduous, each decision less decisive and its implementation less certain, while behind it all, like a constant threat, there lurked mistrust, inadequacy, and possible disaster. It was the East making its appearance.

  The commanding officer at Split who had provided a wretched-looking carri
age (to take him only as far as Sinj, on the frontier), with ponies for the luggage and a four-man escort, was harassed, in a bad mood, almost spiteful. Young though he was, Desfosses recognized in it the legacy of long wars. For years men had gone about staggering under a load, as it were, each hefting his own misery, all of them displaced, watching for the moment when they could foist some of their burden on the others and so make it easier for themselves, by coarse abuse and unkind words if in no other way. So the common plight rolled on and shifted from place to place, from person to person, and in moving became, if not lighter, at least easier to bear.

  Desfosses felt this when, in an unguarded moment, he made the mistake of asking whether the carriage springs were solid enough and the seats comfortable. The commandant stared at him and there was a light in his eyes that was almost like a drunken man’s.

  “It’s the best we can do in this bloody country. Anyone going to work in Turkey ought to have an arse of steel, anyway.”

  Not batting an eyelash, the young man looked him in the eye and replied with a grin: “My instructions in Paris said nothing about that.”

  The officer nibbled his lower lip, realizing that here was someone who didn’t run away from an argument but seized the opportunity to talk and get a few things off his chest.

  “Well, you see, monsieur, there wasn’t too much of that in our instructions either. It was all put in later, right here on the spot,” and he did a wicked imitation of a scribe wielding a pen.

  With this cynical blessing young Desfosses then set out on a dusty road that presently turned to bare rock as it heaved up steeply beyond the town of Split, taking him farther and farther away from the sea, from the last civilized buildings and green cultivation, only to ease him down once more, on the other side of the craggy ridge, into that other vast sea, Bosnia, where his young credentials would be tested for the first time.